Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,71

of people milling, weeping, praying:

Who is dealing with him?!

Waleed! someone shouted back.

While the doctor continued frowning at the child in a way that suggested only minimal satisfaction, a nurse led us off to the staff mess, where an Arabic soap opera was playing on a television in the corner and my brother presently appeared wearing scrubs. A young man who’d been hit by shrapnel the evening before was waiting for him in the operating theater. My father asked if we could watch.

This happened yesterday? Sami asked the man on the operating table.

The man nodded. At sundown. I was just going out for some bread.

Sami gouged two holes in the man’s torso, just under his arms, to drain the blood from his lungs. The man screamed. He’d been given a small dose of anesthesia, but because anesthesia was one of the things the hospital had too little of, no one gave him more.

Allahu Akbar! cried the man.

Give me more light, said Sami.

An assistant changed the angle of the lamp over the man’s body while two more men, one on either side of him, held him down. My brother fed tubes into the holes under his arms and then adjusted their position so that the man’s skin was drawn away from his rib cage this way and that, like Silly Putty.

No Muslim would do this to another Muslim! cried the man. My son, he is two, his face was blown off! Why are they doing this? Why?

Sami sunk a syringe into the man’s abdomen. When he began digging around in the intubated holes again, I closed my eyes and turned to leave. About half an hour later, when I looked back into the operating theater, it was empty. In the doctors’ mess, the television had been turned off and two men waiting for a kettle to boil were arguing over whether Saddam’s capture of four days earlier was real or a lie propagated by the Americans for publicity. I found my father and brother back in the lobby, standing over the boy with the bloody legs, my father with his arms folded as if he were cold and my brother smoking. Another doctor stood beside Sami, also smoking. Waleed, I guessed. On the other side of the gurney stood three more men, two in dishdashas and the third in a red-and-white keffiyeh knotted under a thick black beard. We found him on Wathiq, one of the men was saying. Says he lives in Zayouna. Says his name is Mustafa. Says he hasn’t seen his parents since last week. It wasn’t until that point that I looked more closely at the men standing over the boy—who even as he was being discussed continued his preternatural blinking at the wall—and saw that the one with the very black beard and the red-and-white scarf tied around his neck was Alastair.

• • •

PLEASE NOTES read a sign taped to the front door of the Al-Hamra. GUNS MUST BE LEFT AT SECURITY DESK. THANS FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Inside, a man wearing a camel-colored turtleneck sat at the hotel’s reception desk doing a crossword in Arabic. On his desk were a pocket watch, a security wand, and a Kalashnikov, the barrel of which lay aimed at my groin as Sami and I lifted our arms to be frisked.

Through a pair of heavy wooden doors, the journalists’ Christmas party was already under way. The restaurant’s red walls, red tablecloths, and dimly glowing wall sconces all suggested a supper club in purgatory. In one corner, two waiters in bow ties stood quietly at attention, the fabric of their shirts so thin you could plainly see the outline of their tank tops underneath. In another corner, a third Iraqi sat playing big band standards on a piano. The instrument was a blond old upright that faced into the room, its crisscrossed innards partly veiled by a floral-print curtain that matched those on the windows. Although: it was dark outside, and the hotel’s windowpanes had been reinforced with dense argyle iron grids; there might as well have been no windows at all.

In the center of the room a crowd of correspondents, cameramen, photographers, and contractors mingled festively, pouring drinks and cutting cigars. Most of them were men, although there were also a few women present, including one in tight white jeans being cornered by a man who, in a French accent, was explaining how the situation was not unlike Vietnam. You try to crush the resistance and in so doing you inflame the